“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
Karl Marx[Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 1844]

Sunday, 14 July 2013

A Review of London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War. Jayne E E Boys Published: 17 Nov 2011 13 ISBN: 9781843836773 Boydell Press : Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

London's News Press and the Thirty Years War is an
important addition to both our knowledge of the origins of news reporting and
the Thirty Years War. A considerable feat given the complexity of both
subjects. The book is extremely well researched and Boys present her arguments
in a clear and popular way and seeks to demonstrate “the interplay between high
domestic politics, international relations and London news publication”.

Boys shows in her book that Britain in the 17th century
was an important part of a “European-wide news community”. The book is welcome
in this respect because it counters recent historiography that has tended to be
hostile to a Eurocentric viewpoint.

News from the Thirty Years war was eagerly followed by
growing sections of the population. Much of this reporting and printing was
illegal and if caught printers and their writer friends were fined and often
jailed.

It is true as one reviewer pointed out this book is
published at a time when a revolution is taking place amongst our own media
mainly led by the internet. No less a revolution was taking place in the 17th
Century. The media revolution put enormous pressure on monarchs all over Europe
especially in the Britain of James I and Charles I.

The growth of the new media brought unprecedented dangers
to the ruling elites. For the first time ordinary people could read or hear
news and draw conclusions for themselves about the major issues of the day.

Historiography.

Boys presents an understanding of both revisionist and
post revisionist arguments without agreeing with one side or another. It is
only recently that a systematic study of these newsbooks has been undertaken
but has still received “disparate attention from scholars” so it is very
difficult at this stage to place Boys work within current historiography.

Perhaps one of the books weakness certainly for me is it
does not in any real detail examine the disparate pre revisionist
historiography of the Thirty Years War. Current revisionist historiography sees
the war as primarily a religious contest in the words of W. Nif's description
of the Thirty Years' War as the last of the religious wars and one of the many
".

However this view was challenged by the Marxist
historians such as Eric Hobsbawm who saw the war in the context of a general
economic, social and political crisis of the 17th century. According to, J. V.
Polišenský the Thirty Years' War was “the logical outcome of the crisis of
policy of the old feudal ruling class. This political crisis of the declining
sixteenth and the commencing seventeenth centuries had deep social and economic
roots. Economic and political changes did not develop evenly. The law of uneven
development resulted in a peculiar situation in those countries whose economic
and political interests were in a violent contradiction. These buffer-countries
" lay in a disputed no-man's land and were necessarily regarded as natural
danger zones”. The examination these various historiography’s would have
improved an already good book.

Criticisms

Boys research makes extensive use of Corantos . She correctly shows that these newsbooks
and “informational broadsheets” during the Thirty Years War had an important
part to play in the dissemination of news during the English revolution. Boys
has clearly spent a significant amount of time pouring over manuscripts. Her
use of the British Library resources is evident by the use of sources such as
the Trumbull Papers and Joseph Mead’s correspondence,

Like a number of her forbearers such as Christopher Hill
Boys has been unfairly criticized for mostly using printed sources, both
primary and secondary. One such critic said “the author cites the Calendar of
State Papers Domestic for the reigns of James I and Charles I, but not the
State Papers Domestic (SP14 and SP16) in manuscript, available on microfilm and
online. To understand what attempts the
early Stuart monarchs did make to control the press, information from the
actual documents in SPD is vital. SPD is
primarily the archive of the secretaries of state’s office which supervised all
the monarch’s correspondence (indeed all the monarch’s government
business). The senior secretary of state
also coordinated Privy Council business and exercised crown supervision of
printed matter.

“This research lacunae (among others) has led Boys’ to
repeat an unfortunate miss-identification of a licenser for the press, Mr.
Cottington, who is the joint focus of an entire chapter in her book. Cottington’s misidentification here is even
more unfortunate because he was correctly identified decades ago by W. W. Greg,
with Greg’s findings supported later by research from Sheila Lambert. Boys is aware of the controversy over Cottington’s
identity, but chose to follow mistakes originating with F. S. Siebert,
perpetuated in more recent studies by Michael Frearson and Cyndia Clegg. Greg found the autograph imprimatur of George
Cottington on a manuscript submitted to him for approval, now in the Bodleian
Library. Lambert found George
Cottington’s entrance to and degree from Oxford. My own research places him among the
chaplains of the bishop of London”.

Boys points out that during the Thirty Years war
Britain’s ruling elite showed a real fear that news dissemination to the masses
was politically dangerous. Therefore the Crown actively sought to control the
news by appointing Georg Rudolph Weckherlin in 1627 who was “given oversight of
news, as well as other print genres deemed to be politically dangerous”.

Weckherlin’s appointment was done in a typically English
empirical fashion. He was not employed directly by the crown. However with
political and military events proceeding at a dangerous pace the State needed a
far robust response to the growing danger of Britain being dragged into the
Thirty years War and to counteract the growing political, economic and social
crisis already mounting in England.

So from early 1630s William Laud, archbishop of
Canterbury, working through the High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical was
brought in to control the press. Almost immediately the Star Chamber was used
to indict a growing number of people deemed to be advocating sedition. Towards
the end of 1637 a number of trials of prominent figures such Henry Burton, John
Bastwick, William Prynne, and John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, were charged
with seditious libel. However political
events beyond the control of Laud and his master Charles I were to hamper
attempts at press censorship.

Of particularly interest is Boys treatment of the foreign
policies of James I and Charles I.as one reviewer said ” Boys supports recent scholarly efforts to
rehabilitate James’s political and foreign policies, arguing that the king “was
aware of the power of words and sought to influence public opinion” or that Charles, carried out a “laissez-fair
approach to the press” .

It is clear that Charles I had little understanding of
the use of Newsbooks in developing his foreign policy. He “simply did not
appreciate the desirability of telling his side of events, nor see the need to
persuade”

The book is also beautifully presented and illustrated
Boydell Press and deserves a wide readership. It enhances our knowledge of both
the Thirty Years War and the early origins of newspapers. The book as one
writer says it also “increases our understanding of the development of English
periodicals, the monograph also helps explain the fascination with and
establishes the importance of international news in early Stuart England”.

2. Corantos were early informational broadsheets,
precursors to newspapers. Beginning around the 14th century, a system developed
where letters of news and philosophical discussion would be sent to a central
collecting point to be bundled and sent around to the various correspondents.
The banking house of Fugger had an organized system of collecting and routing
these letters, which often could be seen by outsiders. This system would not
die until the 18th century. The term "newspaper" was not coined till
1670. Prior to this, a welter of terms were used to describe this genre
including: paper, newsbook, pamphlet, broadsheet, and coranto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coranto